Evernote

Keeping track of notes, photos, ideas, and all the other stuff that we collect in the digital world (or our head) can be a daunting task. If you find a way to keep it around, finding what you need in all of it can be near impossible. Enter Evernote, the app that remembers everything for you.

Evernote is a free Mac and iOS app that helps you keep track of stuff, using the familiar note and notebook parallel. You create a notes and either type in them, drag or paste in images, videos, and well, just about anything. Those notes can be organized in to notebooks to keep similar themed notes together. Notes can also be tagged with keywords and a title for quickly searching later. Notes can also be sorted by date, title, etc. You then sync the notes with the Evernote servers, and on all of your other devices that have Evernote, and as you'd expect, those notes are then available on those devices. The power of cloud computing at it's best. One cool thing that a lot of people find useful is once you upload a photo, if it has viewable text in it, Evernote will transcribe that text and add it as keywords to that note - whether it is handwritten or type. This allows you to do a search based on words in a photo. You can also share notes with other users, allowing a collaborative workspace no matter where you are, and you'll always have the latest version.

The service and apps are free, but you can upgrade to a premium account for $45 a year if you find yourself using it more than the free version will allow. A premium account allows up to 1GB of data uploads a month, the size of a single note is increased to 50MB, and you receive priority on images processing for text detection, as well as a few more things.

The Notebooks in Evernote on iPad.I've long been an Evernote user on the Mac and having it on my iPhone and iPad makes it incredibly useful. I've gone through old notebooks and taken pictures of individual pages with my iPhone and uploaded them to Evernote, to create digital versions of my notes. I also use it for simple text documents that I like to have with me wherever I go, such as project notes (especially when projects are long term ones), ideas for photographs or lighting set ups, future meeting presentation ideas, and long lists of links.

A note in Evernote on the Mac.

It's free, so why not give it a try!